Breaking through the data access roadblock

The challenge

Our client, one of Australia’s major insurers, was losing customers over time. Business was hurting but marketers were unable to use their data to help them understand why.

Policyholder information was held on a central mainframe system. This system was unable to give marketers the visibility they needed or the ability to analyse and understand their customers, build the right relationships and address the problem of lapses.

Seeking support from their internal IT department, marketers struggled to get the priority needed for their data requests. The lag between request and delivery was unworkable and data files were all but unusable when they finally did appear, dumping around twenty years of data into a large and unwieldy text file.

Marketers hands were tied. It was impossible to measure or record the effect of marketing activities on the policyholder base. The company was unable to access its own customer data and communicate with its customers because of the brick wall built around it by a marketing-unfriendly mainframe system.

The solution

Marketsoft turned an inaccessible, slow and unwieldy data repository into an on-demand marketing resource with a bespoke reporting and analytics capability.

✓ Initial pilot reporting provided an overview of data quality and segmentation potential and the visibility as to how the project would evolve.

✓ Insurance industry expertise was critical to the development of the business rules allowing identification of business source to underpin the ongoing lapse analysis.

✓ An online resource allows marketing to access customer data, constantly refreshed in real time and de-identified to ensure privacy.

✓ Sophisticated, proprietary ‘fuzzy matching’ techniques were used to enable a single customer view.

✓ Single customer view in turn enables a historical view of activity over time.